The Root of All Hypocrisy in the Theological Psychology of Jonathan Edwards

JETS 57/1 (2014) 135–45 NARCISSION: THE ROOT OF ALL HYPOCRISY IN THE THEOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF JONATHAN EDWARDS BRUCE W. DAVIDSON* I. INTRODUCTION Nowadays there is a naïve tendency to accept uncritically all accounts of spiritual experience as authentic. Many books capitalize on this and relate their authors’ supposed experiences with God. For example, in the best-selling book Eat, Pray, Love and the movie based on it, the protagonist encounters God as an entity who simply ratifies her own personal inclinations and pursuit of self-actualization. This god apparently also has no objection to her divorcing her loyal husband as an ob- stacle to those goals.1 SUch accoUnts are widely believed and even admired. Proba- bly as a result of the influence of some forms of psychology and the general neo- Romantic Zeitgeist, contemporary people are apt to put a lot of faith in religious experiences as forces that can change their characters and behavior. Likewise, recent developments in the Christian world promote a style of belief that downplays the rational component of faith and urges instead a more expe- riential approach. Elements of the charismatic/Pentecostal movement, the Spiritual Formation movement, and the Emergent Church reframe Christianity as primarily experience-centered, including the pUrsuit of altered states of conscioUsness, voices, and visions from God. However, along with many others in the PUritan tradition before him, Jonathan Edwards was not so easily impressed by spiritual experiences. A traditional believer in radical human depravity, he knew the human heart to be a wellspring of subtle deception and hypocrisy, even among professing Christian believers. Therefore, “the root and caUse of things is to be looked into” rather than just the phenomena of experience.2 The root of mUch of it he traced to narcissism. Essentially, Edwards saw religious hypocrisy as the oUtgrowth of narcissism. He identified various signs by which one might be able to recognize it in individuals and groups professing religious belief. All of them are telltale signs of self- centeredness. In Edwards’s view, trUe converts manifest marks of love for God that do not spring solely from self-interest. Here I will examine Edwards’s funda- mental ideas about the nature of human evil as well as the historical reasons for his concern aboUt religious hypocrisy. After this, I will look at some prominent attrib- * BrUce Davidson is a professor at HokUsei GakUen University, Nishi 2-chome, 2-3-1 Ohyachi- Nishi, Atsubetsu-kU, Sapporo, Japan 004-8631 and a board member of the Jonathan Edwards Center Japan. 1 Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (New York: Penguin, 2007). 2 Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 4: The Great Awakening (ed. C. C. Goen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972) 234. 136 JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY utes of false piety in Edwards’s analysis and draw out some implications of Ed- wards’s thought for contemporary people, especially Christian believers. II. ORIGINS OF EDWARDS’S INTEREST IN HYPOCRISY Edwards took up the issue of authentic piety versus religious hypocrisy for a number of personal, pastoral, and historical reasons. To begin with, his own pro- cess of conversion had been complicated. According to his own report, Edwards had two religious awakenings in childhood in which he had “much self-righteous pleasure” and a “delight to abound in religious duties.” However, he confessed that at the same time he retained an antipathy to various ideas in Christianity, such as hell and predestination. After a time, his enthusiasms waned and he abandoned his early religious fervency. However, as an adult he experienced an entirely different kind of religious conversion. This eventually caused him to regard his previous experiences as counterfeit. The later experience made him feel profoundly drawn toward God himself even aside from the question of his personal salvation. Medi- tating on the verse “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God…” (1 Tim 1:17), Edwards says “there came into my soul…a sense of the glo- ry of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from any thing I ever experienced before.” Edwards related that after this, “I began to have a new kind of ap- prehensions and ideas of Christ, and the work of redemption, and the glorious way of salvation by him.”3 In many ways, all these experiences—the superficial earlier ones and the later more dramatic change—became models for Edwards’s later de- scriptions of hypocrisy and authentic conversion. As pastor of the church in Northampton, Edwards was involved in a number of religious revivals and their aftermaths. At the beginning, he was very optimistic about the conversions during these revivals, but he gradually moved from a posi- tive to a negative orientation about many of those who claimed conversion. His earlier works about the revivals answer critics and argue strongly for the authenticity of the conversions during them. In his later reflections Edwards came to appre- ciate the danger of hypocrisy more deeply. As uncontrolled fanaticism began to increase and the lives of a number of converts seemed to remain unchanged, eventually Edwards became skeptical of the reality of the experiences of many of the supposed converts.4 3 Iain Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1987) 19–35. 4 Ibid. We can see a clear increase in skepticism in Edwards’s published writings about the revivals over time. His first account, A Surprising Work of God, first published in 1736, takes an almost entirely optimistic view and contains two detailed, moving conversion stories. The next two works, The Distin- guishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God and Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival—published in 1741 and 1742, respectively—contain his first attempts to come up with guidelines to judge the authenticity of religious experiences but basically continue in a laudatory vein. However, when we come to A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, published in 1746, we find a much more rigorous and severe treatment of religious experiences detailing the characteristics of hypocrisy. It does not have much of the character of an apology for the revivals, though Edwards continued to view them as the authentic work of the Spirit. More than the earlier works, Religious Affections should be considered Edwards’s mature, fully-formed analysis of religious experiences. NARCISSION: THE ROOT OF ALL HYPOCRISY 137 Chamberlain views Edwards’s pastoral concern about hypocrisy as a more significant motivation for his works such as A Treatise Concerning the Religious Affec- tions than his desire to defend the revivals from critics.5 Furthermore, she notes that in modern discourse, the term “hypocrisy” often means people who blatantly live in a way that contradicts their profession of religious belief, whereas in Edwards’s time the term often was applied to subtle instances of religious self-delusion, not openly scandalous inconsistency. Edwards appears to have been influenced by the views of the earlier Puritan Thomas Shepard, who also dealt with religious fanaticism and preached pastoral sermons about distinguishing true and false piety.6 The Puritans in general had often taken up the topic of discerning spurious piety. Another influence on Edwards came from the ideological currents of his time, such as the ethical humanism of philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson. Hutche- son seemed to advocate a kind of ethical narcissism, by which we contemplate our own moral virtue with enjoyment: “These moral pleasures … make us delight in ourselves and relish our very nature. …”7 However, from Edwards’s point of view, Hutcheson’s comments just show how “the unregenerate characteristically make themselves their last end, and make their own happiness their chief good, to which they subordinate God,” in Stoever’s paraphrase.8 Over against such humanistic moralists, Edwards maintained that real virtue only existed where non-egotistical love for God reigned supreme.9 He made much the same point about genuine spir- ituality. III. THE ROOTS OF REAL GODLINESS AND HYPOCRISY According to Edwards, the human race breaks down into those “that love God or those that are his enemies.”10 “His enemies” include not only those who are openly irreligious or who profess a false religion but also many of those professing to be Christian believers. What distinguishes the truly godly is that they have real love for God, while hypocrites have only love for themselves, which hides un- der a cover of bogus piety. The devil accused Job of having just that sort of piety.11 Chamberlain describes Edwards’s approach to discerning the difference between the two as the “devil-comparison method.” That is, the devil can counterfeit almost every characteristic of piety except the sort of love for God that the authentically 5 Ava Chamberlain, “Brides of Christ and Signs of Grace” in Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Con- text, Interpretation (ed. Stephen J. Stein; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) 3–18. 6 William Stoever, “The Godly Will’s Discerning: Shepard, Edwards, and the Identification of True Godliness,” in Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation (ed. Stephen J. Stein; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) 85–99. 7 From the “Essay on the Passions,” quoted in William Robert Scott, Francis Hutcheson (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966) 159. 8 Stoever, “Godly Will’s Discerning” 87. 9 Bruce W. Davidson, “The Four Faces of Self-love in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards,” JETS 51 (2008) 89–91. 10 Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 25: Sermons and Discourses 1743–1758 (ed. Wilson H. Kimnach; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) 523–24.

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